No Man's Land
by The Grynne
Summary: [AU] This is what treason will taste like. SydSark.
1. terms

**terms**

This is what treason will taste like.

"I want no concessions," he informs her straight off the bat, low, business-like. "Not from your Agency, not from you."

Curtly nodding her acquiescence: "Understood." They are both experts at lying through their teeth.

Seven weeks after the much spoken-of escape she will arrive home to find him waiting in the unlit bedroom, and with frustratingly little preamble she'll lower her guard and let him fuck her. Sark is the same, hungry and unsatisfied; it almost frightens her, knowing that there is feeling dammed up within her violent enough to act as his foil. After, in the cooling half-light, she will make them both pasta, studiously ignoring the guns he has left -- out of simple courtesy; no prowler or bored assassin, he -- in the kitchen, drawer second from the top, unloaded. Next to the red wine, which he uncorks.

"Cooking, I see, is not one of your many talents."

He will play with the sleeve of his shirt. It is fresh-smelling, like leaves and the slightly caustic blast of powder; and too-large, draped on her naked frame. She turns her nose instead and burrows in the salty warmth of his hair. Sweet tang of tomatoes and oregano on his tongue will taste to her like a minor victory. She seals her coup by leading him back to her bed.

When the dry whisper of his breathing has been slow and steady for forty-two minutes, she will reach for her cell phone. It will be nothing less than what he expects.

Sark will have his back turned to her side of the mattress. His sinewy neck smoothed in sleep; one of her arms will be caught, but loosely, beneath one of his; their mutual fingers knotted in one fist. She thinks about the terms Sark gave her, about what her father and the CIA would demand. She has given them all so much already.

The long moment will bleed out, taking of all her strength with it. Then without dialling, she will push the phone away slowly until she hears the drop. Despite the thick carpet, it lands with a deadened crack, just as Sark catches her shivering, pressed against him. The hand grasped in his now ice-cold as if its life had been spirited away and only just returned.

"Shh... It's all right, Sydney." Calm and awake, he looks into her dark panicked eyes.

"I know."

Perhaps it is what you do, rather than what you say that matters.


	2. lines

**lines**

There are times when she suspects that all the stories about him are true, and that he was made outside of time. Younger than she, yet formidable enough to have once been her mother's right hand. He insinuates as easily as he talks. And he loves to talk.

It is he who suggests the game of chess. The sex earlier was antagonistic, and she accepts, reminding herself that Mr. Sark is no gentleman. He will not play fair if he can help it. Setting the black and white pieces ready in opposition, he starts a casual conversation in Russian, those self-contained eyes challenging her, amused.

"When I was a boy," he says eventually, after rescuing an unguarded bishop. Those words are enough to pull her gaze up, her hand still resting on the pawn on c2.

"I was taken on a wolf hunt, to watch. I was barely six years old. It was the opinion of my father and his associates that the war between man and beast ignites, by its very bloodthirstiness, the brave and noble Russian spirit." Sark pauses to move his queen to the bare edge of defensibility, before picking up his wineglass. "The highlight of that delightful excursion was when one man's rifle discharged accidentally while he was driving the last pair in the pack, and I watched as the bullet took the head of the driver of his snowmobile."

She wipes her palm on the hearthrug, suddenly longing for a drink other than wine, and sets her rook down in front of him. "Check."

"The snow in those forests, Sydney." Deftly, he sacrifices a pawn. "You don't have to imagine. Anyone can be a poet."

"I didn't know you were an environmentalist."

"I believe that nature in the end aborts all our species' hubristic attempts to domineer it. And I never fall into the error of thinking that we can find our worst menace in the Urals, in a Rambaldi device, or in space or chance." With a thin smile Sark takes the last of her knights. "Nature is cruel. But nothing is deadlier or more dangerous than us."

Or me, she thinks. More deadly and dangerous than me. If the prophesy is right.

"You would welcome the apocalypse then, wouldn't you?" she says angrily. "Surely nothing could be more fitting, or right." Her Muscovite accent trips a syllable.

Sark is unreadable. "All men have the equal right to die, but some are more equal than others."


	3. and casualties of war

**and casualties of war**

It is a surprise to her, the pain that comes with the thought of giving up _this_, whatever this is. She has long fought for the impossible: to live in normality and leave the whole clandestine business behind her, freed of being everybody's last hope and best chance. Now there is a new ache, and she does not know what she wants anymore.

* * *

She has been standing in the doorway, wordless, watching him at his computer. Over the last few months, Sark has gradually been leaving traces of himself in her house: things as mundane as a packet of razors, kept in the spare-bathroom closet so as not to draw notice, or a Yeats anthology on her mantel.

The laptop though, it goes when he does.

Five minutes later, he still has not raised his head. "Bad day at the office?" False joviality peppering his voice; it warms her regardless, as he intended.

In equally trivial tones: "Ogling supervisors, missing paperclips. The usual."

They do not avoid mentioning work. For both it is their lives, and the truth is that they have known little else. But often, when it comes up, it is like the business of other people. A theoretical couple stranger than they.

* * *

She will hear it first as noise in her earpiece, a minor note in the auditory chaos her mind is trained to analyse and instantly configure into meaningful data. Without an immediate visual from Vaughn, she does not give the body a name. She sets herself to the task of liberating the case containing the set of detonators, each one worth over a million in dollars and far more in human lives. They will encounter no surprises, and Vaughn calls the retrieval a success.

When they are back on the jet, Weiss will be on the phone to headquarters. He will then turn to them, excited. "You're not going to believe this. Marshall has finished decoding the message that was sent to the other cells leaders. The execution you overheard just before the alarms went off? It was one of the Covenant's own, a traitor apparently."

"Did Marshall say if it was anybody of significance?" Vaughn will ask.

"None other than our friend Julian Sark." Weiss will pause to digest their looks of astonishment. "I guess all that backstabbing finally caught up with him. How's that for irony?" He sounds proud, as if the CIA was holding puppet strings that could make their enemy dance mysteriously.

After there has been a silence she will say, "You're absolutely sure about this?"

"Marshall says that he is eighty-five percent certain, without an actual body."

Vaughn will be laughing softly, dry-chuckling into the back of his hand. "Good," he says, almost to himself. "Good."

They will gradually move onto other topics. She concentrates on breathing. Her throat is tight.

It is an ineludible inconvenience of Europe missions that half the time is lost in flight. She should be home; in LA it is just a little after nine p.m. Last weekend she dug up a scrapbook of Francine's dating back to college with recipes she wants to try. Did she dare honey-seared salmon or the roast chilli salsa? Between episodes of talk, Vaughn and Weiss keep looking at her. Their sloping glances connect random pairs of target and origin, never lingering. She turns her cheek flush against the headrest, as if to doze. Eyelids squeezed shut so that they will not hear her scream.

(The End)


End file.
